A dog is man's best man-made friend

Are canines the product of our cut-and-paste whims? Is man's best friend a man-made creation?

That's how it appears in "Science of Dogs," which charts the human quest to shape a perfect pet.

Airing at 7 p.m. Wednesday on National Geographic Channel, this "Explorer" edition points out that the dog is more varied in size and behavior than any other species on Earth (even though, genetically, dogs are 99.8 percent alike).

Much of the variation, the show points out, is thanks to man's use of evolutionary manipulation to create breeds that suit human needs.

Today there are 400 dog breeds (and counting), according to the film -- "each one designed by us, for us." And 80 percent of those breeds didn't exist 130 years ago.

These dogs were hard to train, so they were bred with reindeer herding hounds, fox terriers and spitz dogs to create the current Sulimov dog.

Sulimovs' sense of smell is so acute they can sniff out 12 different chemical components of explosives -- some of them as small as a grain of sand -- through luggage.

There are about 40 Sulimovs, all in Russia and owned by Aeroflot airlines.

The creature we now know as the dog started out as a wolf, then was pulled from the wild to give companionship to early humans.

Gradually it became domesticated. Many thousands of years later, the Industrial Revolution sparked an unprecedented focus on material design and physical perfection, with dogs a beneficiary because they became a status symbol of the new middle class.

The customized canine was suddenly the rage. It still is. As "Science of Dogs" explains, it began in the wag of a tail.